27 April 2019 10:30 AM

Saturday PS: It's coming some time

WHAT a decade this has been for ideas long considered dead and buried to come lurching out of the grave. Marxism, not least in Jeremy Corbyn’s Labour Party; fascism, with elected legislators in Germany and Greece; what the late Frank Johnson called The Moderate Terror (Change UK, Emmanuel Macron, assorted Democratic Party candidates).

Anything missing? Well, good old-fashioned anarchism isn’t getting much of a shout. Not yet, anyway.

As one may have expected (the clue’s in the name), anarchist economic thinking is fairly…anarchic. Wikipedia tries to bring some coherence to the notion but it soon becomes clear that there are nearly as many varieties of anarchist economics as there are anarchist economists.

Broadly speaking, there’s the branch that abuts communism/socialism, stressing common ownership and the abolition of private property, and there’s the branch that envisages a future in which people work for free, safe in the knowledge that everyone else is doing the same, thus a plumber will always be able to call upon the services of a baker, and vice versa.

I am not very interested in either of these branches. More fruitful in terms of our present discontents is, I believe, the branch represented by Pierre-Joseph Proudhon (1809-1865), who drew a sharp distinction between what may be called personal private property, earned through individual labour, and what Marx may have called alienated property, such as a shareholding in a huge industrial concern.

To quote my top source, William I. Kipedia: “Proudhon favoured a right of individuals to retain the product of their labour as their own property, but believed that any property beyond that which an individual produced and could possess was illegitimate. He thus saw private property as both essential to liberty and a road to tyranny, the former when it resulted from labour and was required for labour and the latter when it resulted in exploitation (profit, interest, rent and tax).”

I couldn’t agree more. The indifference or even hostility of socialists towards personal private property (as Matthew Parris noted, they support it only when it “works”) is a key reason why I am not of their ranks, and my attitude to communal ownership of personal homes and effects is that of GK Chesterton, who declared that he did not want it even as an ideal, even as a very remote ideal – he did not want it at all.

But how someone can be said to “own” a vast business empire in which they have no hands-on involvement, or huge chunks of Scotland, is a mystery to me.

So, it turns out I have been an anarchist all along. Who’d have guessed it?

Free to live

HOWEVER, I suspect an anarchist revival, should it happen, will spring not from a mass conversion to the economic ideas of Proudhon & Co but from a colossal backlash against what I have called the Goon State, the endlessly-interfering, hectoring and nannying British public sector.

When Ronald Reagan was first elected President in 1980, former Secretary of State Henry Kissinger recalled that, about ten years earlier, he had chatted informally to groups of radical students, then in the habit of bringing Washington to a standstill with mass protests.

Unlike many Nixon henchmen, Dr K, as an academic, was quite happy to meet the undergrad fraternity. But he warned them that if they persisted in challenging an achievement-orientated society based on the family and the Protestant work ethic, they would bring about a reaction.

Reagan, said Kissinger, was that reaction.

Similarly, I do not think the political, bureaucratic and judicial class can endlessly ban things, issue directives, dream up new thought crimes and divide society between assorted protected groups and everyone else without suffering a massive reaction.

The Brexit vote was, in part, such a reaction, but there is, I feel and hope, much, much more to come.

Saturday miscellany

TALKING of nannying, did you see the apparently-uncritical press coverage this week of “UN experts” telling parents to stop young children watching television or using other screen-based devices? Who in their right minds would take child-rearing advice/instructions from “UN experts”? I’d rather listen to the local madman/meths drinker/bag lady.

HOW long, do you think, before the Royal Navy caves in to demands from “activists” (i.e. creeps and control freaks) and follows the Scottish Maritime Museum in no longer referring to ships as “she”? Officially, the Senior Service is standing firm on this one, but we all know it will fold shortly. End of the year, I’d guess.

I don’t read the Telegraph titles as carefully as I used to, so I may have missed something, but to my astonishment this week I came across only one boring, lengthy feature about a dreary individual who seems to think we care one way or another that he/she has given up drinking. Come on, Teetotalgraph, you can do better than this.

SOME time ago, my wife (an excellent negotiator) haggled a Telegraph sales chap down to a reasonable and open-ended subscription price. I’d say the result is we’re more or less paying for what we consume, i.e. the letters, the leaders, the facing page (that’s the one opposite the leaders, for non-hacks), the better bits of the business section and the obituaries. The rest? A waste of good drinking time.

AN excellent expose in this week’s edition of The Spectator by Douglas Murray of the sacking by Theresa May’s worthless “Government” of the distinguished philosopher Sir Roger Scruton after a sting operation by the New Statesman. He had been an unpaid adviser on the built environment. The key point that I took from this fine piece was that the following Tory rubbish must never be allowed anywhere near the highest offices of State: Johnny Mercer MP and spineless Cabinet Minister James Brokenshire, he who actually fired Scruton. What a piece of doggy-do.

Is this PwC/Or is this…?

A last word on anarchism. A former boss began her career not in journalism but in the accounting firm now known as PricewaterhouseCoopers. As a very junior person on a big-company audit, she rang the hugely grand audit partner one day to question an injunction in the audit rulebook. He told her to follow the rules. A few days later, she rang him about a quite different rule, and received the same response. The rest of the time, she worked long hours, diligently. Soon after, she met him face to face and introduced herself. “Ah,” he replied, “so you’re the anarchist!”